Search This Blog

Saturday, November 29, 2014

As reported by ComputerWorld: Imagine a fleet of quad copters or drones equipped with explosives and controlled by terrorists. Or someone who hacks into a connected insulin pump and changes the settings in a lethal way. Or maybe the hacker who accesses a building's furnace and thermostat controls and runs the furnace full bore until a fire is started.

Those may all sound like plot material for a James Bond movie, but there are security experts who now believe, as does Jeff Williams, CTO of Contrast Security, that "the Internet of Things will kill someone."

Williams, whose firm provides application security, doesn't know exactly how IoT might be used to kill someone or what device will be implicated in the nefarious scheme, but considers it a certainty that a connected device will play a role in a murder.

You can dismiss these concerns as hype or exaggeration, but many security community predictions about earlier Internet-related risks have become true. As businesses raced to develop Web platforms, security experts imagined massive breaches and thefts of personal and financial data in every way possible. There's no question they were right.

Today, there is a new "rush to connect things" and "it is leading to very sloppy engineering from a security perspective, which makes ... internet of things devices very attackable -- the way web applications were 10 years ago," said Williams.

There are industry verticals that are trying to avoid IoT security problems from the onset by setting up industry collaborations, said John Pescatore, director of emerging security trends at the Sans Institute.

One major effort, the Industrial Internet Consortium, was founded in March and includes IBM, HP, GE, Microsoft and Toyota, among many others. It is now working on IoT security issues. There are other industries, such as medical device and automotive, that are doing much the same thing.

Enterprise users, however, will have to integrate all these technologies, with multiple operating systems, and then make them all work together as a system, said Pescatore. He noted the difficultly it took to get security standards on a PC.

"I think it makes the system integration a lot harder," said Pescatore, and it was "hard enough doing PCs and servers."

New methods of securing IoT devices may emerge. For instance, in the scenario where a furnace runs constantly in an effort to burn down a house, the power passes through the electric utility, which can act like a managed service provider, or quasi-firewall, and take action when a power use anomaly is detected, said Pescatore.

Predicting murder via the IoT is, for now, nothing more than speculation. But the risks, and the types of risks, are increasing.

In a speech earlier this year, CIA Director John Brennan said that as "we move closer to what some are calling an 'Internet of Things,' there will be more devices and systems to protect -- and, equally worrisome, more that can be used to launch attacks."

Thursday, November 27, 2014

Eight Montana grizzly bears have been outfitted with GPS trackers in an ongoing study that could bring some unnerving news to hunters.

The study is aimed at bolstering the theory that grizzlies, which can be as stealthy as they are ferocious, stalk hunters from as close as the length of a football field in order to steal their prey. Already, data has shown at least one grizzly following oblivious elk hunters almost from the moment they left the parking lot, according to the Billings Gazette. Scientists believe the bear may have been following the humans in hopes of getting to a fallen elk before they did.

"Bears opportunistically scavenge carcasses throughout the active season and commonly usurp kills of other predators, such as cougars and, since their reintroduction in 1995, gray wolves,” stated a report last year by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team. “Remains left by hunters also provide grizzly bears with meat, and bears are attracted to areas outside of national parks when these remains become available during the fall.”

The Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, part of the U.S. Geological Survey, started the project over the summer, by tagging the grizzlies in the Grand Teton National Park. Next, the study team asked elk hunters to voluntarily carry some 100 GPS units that track their routes.

In the most clearly detailed example, a group of hunters turned on their GPS devices moments after leaving a parking area at around 6 a.m. When scientists analyzed their movements later and contrasted them with those of a nearby grizzly, it became clear the bear was tailing them.

The bruin stayed downwind of the hunters, at one point coming within 100 yards of them as they moved around a lake. At around noon, the bear bedded down for a nap, but easily picked up the hunters’ trail again when it awoke, according to the report. Grizzly bears’ have a sense of smell seven times greater than that of a bloodhound, and 100 times that of a human by some estimates. Grizzlies also possess a Jacobson’s organ in the roof of their mouth that can detect heavier moisture-borne odors.

Scientists tracked the bear as it appeared to smell an elk carcass from 4 miles away, follow the scent and even wound up swimming across the lake to get to it, according to the report. They also observed that the bear made some evasive maneuvers, possibly to avoid an untagged grizzly competing for the same meat.

“The temporary movements away from the carcass could be indicative of this particular bear being ‘pushed off’ the carcass by a more dominant bear,” said Frank van Manen, of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team based in Bozeman.

Grizzlies have been known to steal the prey of hunters and fishermen alike. Animals such as elk may travel for miles after being wounded, leaving hunters the task of tracking them even as bears may be doing the same.So attuned to the movements of hunters are the bears that scientists believe they may even listen for the sound of gunshots, knowing that they signal a meal to be scavenged. Grizzlies are known scavengers, and officials noted there have been cases of the mighty bruins attacking hunters as they dressed elk in the field. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks now requires successful bison hunters outside of Yellowstone National Park to move carcasses and gut piles 200 yards away from homes, roads and trails to lessen the chances of human-bear interactions, according to the Gazette.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Chemical computing may not be as practical as electronic GPS, but it works-and it's fast.

As reported by FastCompany: What to do when the GPS on your phone is being wonky and you have no clue where you're going? If these scientists have their way,
there may be an alternative to find the fastest route to your
destination: a totally analog GPS that works by using the age-old laws
of chemistry.

The "chemical computing" system is admittedly a bit less practical than even those frustrating Garmins, but it could work faster than traditional satellite-based navigation. It’s already has been used to find the fastest route to a pizza restaurant in the city of Budapest.

To set it up, the scientists first created a maze that looks like a
map of the area and includes start and end points. They filled it with
an alkaline liquid, and at the exit of the labyrinth (i.e. the
destination), placed a gel mixed with an acid. The acid slowly spread
around the maze, but most of it stayed at the exit. Next, they mixed
another alkaline solution with a colored dye and added it to the maze’s starting point. The starting point solution automatically moved towards the place with the highest acidity, i.e. the exit of the maze.

Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology Rita Toth, a co-author of the study, explains that a chemical computer
is more efficient than an electronic one because it finds all possible
routes in parallel. While the dye mostly moves via the fastest route
from start to finish, some of it also moves along other, less efficient
routes. "A normal computer calculates step-by-step one possibility after
another, which takes longer," she writes in a press release.

It’s not the first time scientists have tested alternative systems to
design or discover new routes. When scientists arranged oat flakes in
the pattern of Japanese cities, for example, single-celled slime molds built nutrient channels in a pattern similar to the Japanese rail system. In that work, according to Wired, the scientists believed the slime mold’s behavior could help design more efficient, adaptable transportation networks.

The chemical computer team,
which also included researchers in Hungary, Japan, and Scotland, is now
creating larger, more complex mazes and eventually hopes the system
could be useful in transportation planning and other fields. Already,
however, the Budapest pizza navigation was a proof-of-concept in the
real world.

As reported by Techcrunch: When it comes to food delivery, people want things fast and fresh and
most of all, and increasingly they want to know when that food will get
to them. Thanks to the Uber-ification of everything, being able to
place an order and see when it will arrive (and even see a delivery in
process) is becoming table stakes in the on-demand economy.

Then again, setting expectations for on-demand logistics is not easy. Which is why a whole bunch of math geeks created Fluc,
which is a food-delivery service that tries to provide better customer
service using complex routing algorithms to get food to its customers
faster.

With that goal in mind, Fluc raised $2.3 million in seed funding to
expand its business and keep moving into new markets. The new financing
came from investors that include Sherpa Ventures, WI Harper, Charlie
Cheever, Blake Ross, Zhou Hongyi, and other angels.

Fluc to date has mostly been operating in the South Bay,
working to figure out how to most efficiently make deliveries in what
is essentially a suburban market. Its key differentiator isn't in the
restaurants it signs up or the food it delivers, necessarily, but in the
routing that it’s built on the back end, which makes more efficient use
of its drivers.

In the same way that Uber or Lyft has a good idea of where demand
will be based on factors like time of day or even weather, Fluc uses a
huge amount of data to provide precise estimates of when food will be
delivered to customers. But setting expectations around arrival is one
thing — behind the scenes Fluc is optimizing routes and pickups for its
drivers in real-time.

That means not only knowing where orders will be coming from, but
also generally how long food will take to prepare based on venue and
location, how long it takes to get from one place to another, and where
items need to be delivered. Based on all the info provided, Fluc seeks
to optimize driver routes to enable them to “stack” multiple orders in a
more efficient manner, while also getting food to the customer in a
short period of time.

Fluc calls its logistics technology “The Oracle,” based on the
Matrix, and co-founder Tim Davis says the backend platform can typically
predict a driver’s moves up to 3-5 deliveries ahead of where they
currently are at any given time.

Fluc’s cost of delivery is at $6 per order now, but users can now
split the bill when ordering multiple items, which reduces the
individual price for each person. As a result, the company could draw
more orders from office workers for lunch or for those hanging out and
watching a Football game in Sunday.

Now that it’s received seed funding, the outfit is ready to expand
its offering into new places. While Davis wouldn’t say which markets the
company would be focusing on, showing that the service works in
suburban areas, as opposed to highly dense cities, means it has huge
potential in places where delivering $10 meals in 10 minutes wouldn’t
make sense.

That publication date is a projection, included in the DOT’s monthly regulatory update.

The report also says a projected rule to mandate the use of speed limiters
will be sent from the DOT to the White Houses’ Office of Management and
Budget next month, in line for a March 16 publication date.

That projected rule’s action dates, however, have been pushed back several times this year already.

Here are the projected dates for other upcoming regulations included in the report:

Liability insurance increase: Still
projected for publication this month is an Advanced Notice of Proposed
Rulemaking regarding the minimum amount of liability insurance that
motor carriers must have. The ANPRM will likely be simply a questionnaire for carriers that will be used as a data gathering tool for the agency and not a rule intended to raise the current minimum.

The agency still would have to produce a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and accept public comment before crafting a Final Rule.

Safety Fitness Determination: The
DOT also projects in its report that FMCSA’s long-awaited Safety
Fitness Determination rule will be published in April as a NPRM. The
rule, once final, will allow the agency to use the data at its disposal
to create absolute scores for carriers, which would be used to target
them for intervention.

The DOT projects a publication date of March 24. The rule
will be sent to the OMB Dec. 23, according to the projection, and clear
the OMB March 24.

CDL Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse:
The Clearinghouse would establish a database of drives who have failed
or refused to take a drug or alcohol test. The rule is scheduled to be
published as a Final Rule in October 2015. It was published as a
proposed rule this year.

Driver coercion prohibition rule:
This rule would prohibit carriers, brokers and others from coercing
drivers to violate federal rules, like hours of service. It is scheduled
to be published as a final rule Sept. 10, 2015. It was published as a
proposed rule this year.

Monday, November 24, 2014

As reported by MIT Technology Review: The rise of Wi-Fi and cellular data services made Internet access
more convenient and ubiquitous. Now some of the high-speed backhaul data
that powers Internet services looks set to go wireless, too.

Technology
that uses parallel radio and laser links to move data through the air
at high speeds, in wireless hops of up to 10 kilometers at a time, is in
trials with three of the largest U.S. Internet carriers. It is also
being rolled out by one telecommunications provider in Mexico, and is
helping build out the Internet infrastructure of Nigeria, a country that
was connected to a new high-capacity submarine cable from Europe last
year.

AOptix, the
company behind the technology, pitches it as a cheaper and more
practical alternative to laying new fiber optic cables. Efforts to dig
trenches to install fiber in urban areas face significant bureaucratic
and physical challenges.

Meanwhile, many rural areas and
developing countries lack the infrastructure needed to support fiber,
says Chandra Pusarla, senior vice president of products and technology
at AOptix. He says a faster way to install new capacity is to use his
company’s wireless transmission towers to move data at two gigabits per
second.

Pusarla says the service is particularly attractive to
wireless carriers, whose customers have growing appetites for mobile
data. Many U.S. providers are currently scrambling to install fiber to
replace the copper cables that still link up around half of all cellular
towers, he says, but progress has been slow and costly. In the suburbs
of New York City, the cost of installing a single kilometer of new fiber
can be $800,000, says Pusarla.

AOptix technology takes the form
of a box roughly the size of a coffee table with an infrared laser
peering out of a small window on the front, and a directional millimeter
wave radio beside it. The two technologies form a wireless link with an
identical box up to 10 kilometers away. A series of such connections
can be daisy-chained together to make a link of any length.

AOptix
teamed up the laser and radio links to compensate for weaknesses with
either technology used alone. Laser beams are blocked by fog, while
millimeter wave radio signals are absorbed by rain. Routing data over
both simultaneously provides redundancy that allows an AOptix link to
guarantee a rate of two gigabits per second with only five minutes or
less downtime in a year, whatever the weather conditions, says Pusarla.

A typical fiber connection might be 10 or more times faster than
that, due to the limitations of the radio frequency link. But AOptix
says the convenience of its technology makes up for that, and it could
be increased to four gigabits or more in the future.

The radio and
laser equipment inside an AOptix device move automatically to
compensate for the swaying of a cell tower caused by wind. AOptix
originally developed its laser technology for the Pentagon, designing
systems that actively steer laser beams to keep data moving between
ground stations, drones, and fighter jets.

Pursala declined to
identify the three U.S. carriers that have been testing AOptix’s
technology over the past year or so, or its Nigerian customer.

Other
early customers are being more open. The Mexican telecommunications
company Car-sa recently switched on the first of several links it plans
to use to link up cellular towers and provide Internet to corporate
customers. And before the end of the year, Anova Technologies,
a networking company that specializes in the financial industry, will
use AOptix technology in New Jersey to shave nanoseconds off the time it
takes data to travel between the computers of Nasdaq Stock Market and
the New York Stock Exchange.

As reported by Techcrunch: Let’s face it: Elon Musk is probably a time traveler sent back to
help us leave earth behind and achieve the next phase of human
evolution. The inventor and entrepreneur issued a minor tweet storm earlier, in which he detailed a new SpaceX program to test the function of
“X-Wing” style grid fins that could help spacecraft navigate upon
re-entry after delivering personnel or cargo to an orbiting space
station.

Here, in chronological order, are Musk’s own tweets describing the
tech, which, also includes an autonomous seafaring drone spaceport
platform, to give them a landing pad that can hold its position within
three meters’ distance even in the heart of a raging storm.

The SpaceX reusable rocket program has been progressing with varying
results, including an explosion over Texas back in August. While the
incident didn't result in any injury or even “near injuries,” Musk
conceded in a tweet that this was evidence that “[r]ockets are tricky.”
An earlier test flight from this summer involving an ocean splashdown
was considered more successful, proving that the Space X Falcon 9
booster could re-enter earth’s atmosphere, restart its engines, deploy
its landing legs and make a touch down at “near zero velocity.”

These new modifications to the rocket should make atmospheric
navigation easier, with each fin operating independently to help control
the craft’s angle, speed and vector. They also fold up and stow during
takeoff, so they don’t add any additional drag. The autonomous
spaceports are essentially seafaring landing pads, which can help make
sure that re-entering craft are far from any populated areas in the
event of any incident, while still providing a stable target for landing
spaceships.

All of which is to say, once again, that Elon Musk and everything he
does is pretty much amazing.

As reported by the NY Times: A
government auction of airwaves for use in mobile broadband has blown
through presale estimates, becoming the biggest auction in the Federal Communications Commission’s history and signaling that wireless companies expect demand for Internet access by smartphones to continue to soar.

And it’s not over yet.

Companies
bid more than $34 billion as of Friday afternoon for six blocks of
airwaves, totaling 65 megahertz of the electromagnetic spectrum, being sold by the F.C.C.
That total is more than three times the $10.5 billion reserve price
that the commission put on the sale, the first offering of previously
unavailable airwaves in six years.

Prices
are likely to rise further, because the auction has no definite end and
could continue for days or weeks. The previous record was $18.9 billion
raised in a 2008 sale of airwaves that, because of their lower
frequency, are considered more attractive for wireless phone use than
the current batch.

“It’s
stunning,” said Preston Padden, executive director of the Expanding
Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition, a group representing broadcast
television stations that are considering giving up their spectrum for
sale in the F.C.C.’s next auction, scheduled for 2016. “Consumer demand
for wireless broadband is on a growth curve that looks like a hockey
stick, and carriers are desperate to keep up with that demand.”

The F.C.C. chairman, Tom Wheeler. “Years of hard work paved the way” for the auction, he said.Credit
Jabin Botsford/The New York Times A
successful sale was anything but a foregone conclusion. The frequencies
are currently occupied by government agencies, including branches of
the military, which had to be cajoled to agree to move out or to share
portions of them.

Several
factors appear to have contributed to the auction’s success, as the
pent-up demand from years without an auction coincided with the
explosive popularity of smartphones and mobile broadband. The response
is more surprising given that the airwaves’ high frequency makes them
less attractive for wireless use than those sold in the last auction or
scheduled for the 2016 sale.

Coming soon after President Obama called for strong net neutrality regulations
to be applied equally to wireless networks, the robust bidding also
seems to indicate that mobile phone companies are not as reluctant to
make new investments as they indicated they were when protesting the
president’s recommendation.

The
auction is a significant victory for the F.C.C. and the National
Telecommunications and Information Administration, the agency in the
Commerce Department that oversees the nation’s communications systems.
It makes it much likelier that broadcast stations might be willing to
give up or move their positions on the spectrum to free up airwaves to
be sold in the 2016 auction, because they will receive a portion of the
proceeds as an incentive.

“Years
of hard work paved the way” for the auction, “and ongoing bidding
appears to signal considerable commercial interest in this spectrum,”
the F.C.C. chairman, Tom Wheeler, and an assistant secretary of
commerce, Lawrence E. Strickling, said in a joint statement on Friday.

About
$7 billion of the proceeds will be used to finance the building of a
nationwide public-safety communications network, known as FirstNet, with
the remainder going to the Treasury.

The
relatively high position on the electromagnetic spectrum of the blocks
being sold also cast doubt on their attractiveness. Higher-frequency
waves generally have more trouble passing through buildings, making them
less desirable for mobile phones, although they are able to carry lots
of data, increasingly important to wireless broadband.

Frequencies
being sold include two blocks in the 1695-1710 megahertz band, and four
paired sets of frequencies at 1755-1780 and 2155-2180 megahertz. The
next scheduled broadcast spectrum auction, in 2016, involves frequencies
in the 600 megahertz band.

The
last such sale was in 2008, when the iPhone was barely a year old and
demand for mobile broadband was at a relative trickle. Today, as
consumers stream video and share photographs with many more phones,
tablets and other devices, demand for bandwidth has exploded.

Some
analysts have also speculated that because the auction of broadcast
television bands currently scheduled for 2016 has already been delayed
twice, buyers might be skeptical that those frequencies will come to
market on schedule — giving them extra incentive to buy now rather than
wait.

Still,
the current spectrum, known as the AWS-3 bands, is also not likely to
be available for use for some years. Government users will first have to
move out of the bands, or buyers figure out how to share some of the
airwaves with military operators.

Seventy
companies were approved to bid in the auction, but the high bidders
will not be identified until after the auction is completed. New owners
will then have to engineer their devices to work with the high-frequency
spectrum, although the biggest companies, like AT&T and Verizon
Wireless, already use similar, adjacent frequencies, so that is not
likely to be too onerous.

Verizon
Wireless and AT&T are assumed to be among the big bidders in the
sale. But Philip Cusick, a financial analyst at J.P. Morgan, wrote in a
note to clients on Thursday that “the continued rapid rise in bids is a
sign that there is a third, or perhaps fourth, large bidder in the
auction.”

One
of those could be Dish Network, the satellite company, which already
owns some nearby frequencies. Dish Network’s share price rose 13 percent
last week as investors realized the aggressive bidding meant Dish’s
holdings were probably undervalued.

Shares
of Verizon and AT&T, for their part, fell slightly, as analysts
noted that the companies might be spending more than they expected.

Some
prices are truly eye-popping. The price for licenses in a 20-megahertz
block of paired frequencies covering New York and Long Island and
portions of adjacent states stood at $1.96 billion Friday afternoon. In
the bidding round that starts Monday morning, the minimum bid is more
than $2 billion.

The
results of the yet-to-be-completed auction have some parties calling
for Congress to pave the way for more sales, and soon. “Companies are
clamoring to give the federal government money,” Vince Jesaitis, vice
president for government affairs at the Information Technology Industry
Council, a trade group, wrote on the group’s blog last week.

“The
clamoring for spectrum available in this auction,” he added, “should
refocus our lawmakers’ attention on the value of this resource and the
need to put it to use to meet the needs of the American public.”

Google+ Badge

Follow by Email

About Me

I have more than 25 years of experience in development, design, and mobile communications products and technology. I also enjoy skiing, hiking, scuba, tennis, reading, traveling, foreign languages, and painting. I'm an active member of the National Ski Patrol (NSP) and volunteer my time at either Loveland Ski resort, or Ski Cooper.